800 top minds together in Maastricht
From 24 to 28 July, over 650 game theorists from all over the world will come together for the 5th World Congress of the Game Theory Society. This World Congress is held only once every four years; earlier editions took place in Bilbao, Marseilles, Evanston and Istanbul. Game theory is a mathematical discipline that centres on decision-making. It deals with models of conflict, competition and cooperation, in which each party is focused on achieving its own individual aims. The societal importance of this field of research is evidenced by the large number of game theorists who have won a Nobel Prize in economics. These include: Nash (known from the film A Beautiful Mind), Selten, Harsanyi (1994), Aumann, Schelling (2005), Hurwicz, Maskin, Myerson (2007), Roth, Shapley (2012), and Tirole (2014). Three of these Nobel laureates are also scheduled to speak at the Congress.
Robert J. Aumann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005 Nobel laureate), Eric Maskin, (Harvard University, 2007 Nobel laureate) and Roger Myerson (University of Chicago, 2007 Nobel laureate) will each deliver a brief reading (similar to a TED talk) during a special Nobel session at the Theater aan het Vrijthof, from 11.00 to 14.00 on Monday 25 July. These readings will touch on topics including the presidential elections in the United States, consciousness and types of balance.
Parallel to the World Congress, the same team of Maastricht scientists have organised the 17th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC16), in which social and economic interaction on the Internet will take centre stage. Participants will include members of the research divisions of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay. The themes of this conference have numerous aspects in common with game theory and will attract an additional 150 participants to Maastricht.
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